


losing track

by horrorterroronesie



Category: The Bifrost Incident - The Mechanisms (Album), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, that tall child looks terrible! get some rest tall child!, they/he lyf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:01:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23558788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horrorterroronesie/pseuds/horrorterroronesie
Summary: A sleepless night and an unproductive meeting. Inspector Second Class Lyfrassir Edda continues to research the Black Box.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 106





	losing track

Thor was gearing up for a final defiant march to Odin’s cabin. Sigyn, too. Loki held her head in her hands, tears dripping down her face as she fought to remember herself.

And then nothing. 

Static.

Rewind.

Lyfrassir didn’t know how long he’d been watching. The faces blurred together like grains of sand. Pixels upon pixels of static, then, dripping down an hourglass. He felt sick. He didn’t want to be bearing witness to this, this pointless web of long-dead politicians and revolutionaries and sacrifices. 

He couldn’t help but think of them as characters, playing their parts like pawns on a chessboard or actors in a play. Twirling around the stage, compartment to compartment, shouting and crying and swearing quiet and deafening vengeance and beyond it all Odin. Sneering and turning away because she had better things to do, but he didn’t know what she had planned. All those years ago, when they’d all first boarded the train.

God, these were real people. They had lived and breathed and  _ meant _ something. Were it not for the complicated webs of politics between Midgard and Asgard, he could have looked at them and talked to them, but all that remained now was their little clockwork cycles in the code of the black box. And then static, and his heavy breathing as he downed another cup of coffee and tried a new strategy. Maybe if he ran the output through an analogue system and then recorded the result remotely, he could have something usable. Maybe if he bypassed video, he could at least have the sound and piece it together from there.

By the time the sun started to rise, Lyfrassir had cottoned on to the idea that he should have maybe left to go home at some point yesterday. Okay then, he would just pop home to have a shower, then leave early in the afternoon.

He packed up and left before any of his coworkers could come in, taking the bus home and collapsing on his bed fully clothed. 

He awoke in the afternoon, gripped by terror from a nightmare he couldn’t quite put into words, the memory of it dripping out his grasp with an oil-slick sheen. He checked his phone, just to see if he’d set a new record for missed calls from his boss, but saw it was Saturday. Huh.

It took him a 5 p.m. breakfast after a cold shower to decide he didn’t have anything better to do with his time, so maybe he could go visit the prisoners again. It was something masochistic at this point, perhaps, but Von Raum couldn’t possibly be hiding another violin. Definitely not after last time.

*

When Lyfrassir got there, however, they heard something they had never heard before.

The prisoners were arguing.

“There’s nothing of value for us here. It’s not even-” La Cognizi, sounding annoyed.

“It’s a  _ story, _ Raph! Can’t you feel it? Just on the cusp of unravelling.” Von Raum, as infuriatingly intense as ever.

“We’ve been waiting for eighty years. For the first seventy, the likelihood of a notable story occurring was 0.936-”

“And now?”   
“...Rapidly increasing. Currently at 96.34904 recurring. No, now it is 96.3490444444-”

“We can’t even tell it.” La Cognizi interjected.

“-444445.” Alexandria finished defiantly. “6.”

“Not now, sure, but you’ve been saying we should branch out with our musical style. We can get Jonny to play-”

And now Lyfrassir decided to make their presence known.

“-Inspector Lyf! What a wonderful surprise! To what do we owe this visit?”   
“...To nothing. I was just… what did you mean, a story?”

“You know, Inspector. A chronicle! A history! A tale as of yet untold, you see, I would elaborate but you seem to have taken my violin.”

They breathed a sigh of relief. It hadn’t reappeared, then. 

“No, that’s for the best. I… Oh, forget it.”

“Why, did you just come here to attempt to say things in front of us, then leave? For shame, Inspector! Not even a brooding glance!”

“Leave me alone, Von Raum. If I knew why I willingly came to be bothered by you, I assure you you’d be the first to know.”

They turned on their heel and left. The argument they’d overheard was genuinely unusual for the trio, as far as they knew, and they didn’t know if it was their lack of sleep that gave it an ominous tinge. They were not, however, an optimistic man, and so didn’t believe for a second that even the grimmest of portents could excuse them from their job. One more day of anxious waiting and chocolate lamington ice cream and then they would be back.

Back with the static and the stories and the anguish of these, by all accounts, long-dead people as they fought for something they didn’t understand and against something they couldn’t conceive of and all through it the train flew ever closer to that final moment where there was nothing remaining that they could see.

If it was just the curiosity required of them as their job, they could leave it as a lost cause. If it was just their own investment in the  _ characters _ they saw in the recording, they wouldn’t be feeling the choking terror in each failed attempt, like they were running from something- like they should be running but weren’t.

If it was just the black box, then they should have been able to sleep at night. But their dreams were filled with static and the very edge of a story, glinting in dizzying rainbow like the blade of a knife.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! as always my tumblr is cyberiandemons and the title comes from the mechanisms themselves! wrote this in an hour so im very sorry for any weird sentences.


End file.
